This year, in the days before Christmas, Alaska may be the best place to view the brightest winter stars. The Aurora Borealis aka the Northern Lights are prominent. And on December 21st a fiery Alaska meteor flashed across the skies over Anchorage. It was moving north to south until it crashed outside the city.

This meteor probably originated from the Ursid meteor shower, which started on Dec. 17 and will peak on December 22nd through Christmas Eve.

The American Meteor Society reported that the meteor was seen by dozens of people at around 5:45 a.m., local time. 

Space.com explains that the annual Ursids are actually pieces of debris from comet 8P/Tuttle. This is typically a low-intensity shower. And is a little more visible this year since it coincides with the new moon.

Video images captured a very bright light that lit up yards, and roads.

Fiery Alaska meteor captured on video

“I have seen meteor showers in the past, and this was unlike anything I’d ever seen in the night sky,” one woman reported. 

“The streak was much, much wider, not like the thin lines of shooting stars or meteor showers,” she added.

Video captured by Michael and Heather Stewman’s ring doorbell camera is going viral.

On social media the couple discovered that other videos were showing up. As of December 23rd, the video they shared has been viewed more than 155,000 times. And nearly 2,000 reactions and comments were posted.

Climatologist Brian Brettschneider with the National Weather Service recorded the sight with his Nest door camera.

Brettschneider said this was the first time his doorbell camera had recorded a meteor. And that this meteor was one of the largest seen in the area.

“This is the most impressive one I’m familiar with in the area,” he added.

The seven second video shows the fireball was so bright that it turned the sky a deep blue before crashing behind a tree line. 

No one has been able to locate the exact location where it landed.

“I was stunned. The camera captured a faint moving light that grew bigger and brighter in a matter of seconds. There was a burst of light in the sky, and it faded immediately afterward,” Heather Stewman described the images the couple captured.

“I showed the video to my husband, and he too was in awe. Neither of us have seen anything like this before. ... It looked like it fell in our front yard, but people that were hundreds of miles away were saying the same thing.”

By spooky coincidence, Heather says the fiery meteor appeared on the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.

Meteors explained 

Meteors are fragments and debris from asteroids, comets or other celestial objects shed. 

According to NASA, most meteors burn up as they hit the Earth’s atmosphere. 

It is estimated that 50 tons of this debris falls to Earth every day. And only a few of these space rocks reach the ground and become meteorites.

Physics professor Mark Conde of the University of Alaska Fairbanks said that meteors travel at a minimum speed of just under 7 miles per second.

“I think there are many objects that size hitting the Earth every day, but most of them go unseen because either it’s daytime or there’s just no one there to look,” Conde said.